I am a bit confused about disk space and VMs. First I had an issue with the virtual machine size being a lot larger than the amount of disk space showing as used in the windows server. I used the "shrink" function in vmware tools and this brought the file size of the virtual machine in line with what was reported in windows, or so I thought. After I checked the amount of free space in windows, There was a lot less than before the shrink operation? After research, I found appx 40gb of "wiper" files listed in windows. From what I read, these "wiper" files were used in the shrink operation to write over the deleted files with all zeros. Thinking they weren't necessary, I removed them. (copied them to another server). Once again I thought I was good to go, but now the virtual machine size is once again about 40gb larger than the used space reported in windows.

Shouldn't they be close to the same? What am I missing?

VMware server 1.0.8 on CentOS host. Vm is windows server 2003 with sql database. I created the vm using vmware converter P2V from the original server.

Any suggestions? I'm really new to all this and any help is greatly appreciated.

6 Replies

I don't have any time to read about this, but I'm guessing that your problem stems from dynamic disk allocation, did you set this when you created the VM? I'm only familiar with VirtualBox.. so I'm not entirely sure... but you may want to look into your disk settings and see if it dynamically expands.

@rlow: here's my theory. Dynamic disks expand out to the size you need them, but they don't contract. My guess is you had some Windows fragmentation going on and day to day use (maybe some backups, large file transers, who knows) that essentially used new space, thus expanding the dynamic disk out.

This would leave the dynamic disk larger then the "used" space in Windows.

I agree that is probably what happend, but the "shrink" operation should shrink the dynamic disk back down, and it did, but it left appx 20 2gb files that show up in windows,(the "wiper" files) so that the windows used space is now appx 40gb larger that the size of the dynamic disk, and when I removed these files , the dynamic disk is back to 40gb larger than the space shown in windows? So is it not possible to get them back to close to the same size?

Also, what happens when the size of the VM reaches the allocated disk size?

Double check a couple of things, first is VM tools up to date, if it's not, it won't shrink. And you might want to check on how the disk was created to begin with. I can't recall right off the top of my head and I might be recalling this incorrectly, but if you preallocated everything from the beginning, you won't be able to shrink it.

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